I remembered the poster art from the VHS video cover back when I was a kid, and everything about it seemed to promise a luridly trashy exploitation horror flick.

No such luck. It's not very gory, the story is too unfocused to really assert itself, and it's too consciously a comedy to make much impact as a horror movie.

Vincent (Rory Calhoun, who I think was a big TV star as a cowboy in the 50s) is a slightly creepy farmer who's known far and wide for his smoked meats, running a highway motel with his equally creepy sister Ida (Nancy Parsons).

The source of his being slightly creepy is revealed in short order; the smoked meats his regular customers and passersby love so much is made from human flesh, harvested when Vincent sets elaborate traps on the highway.

He injures and incapacitates victims, drags them back to a cordoned-off area of the property, slashes their throats so they can't talk or scream and buries them up to their necks.

He and Ida then tend them carefully as if they're sprouting flowers, feeding them to keep them alive, apparently tenderising them in the ground (why they do so – apart from it being a good horror movie idea and providing an arresting visual for the marketing – I have no idea; it makes no sense narratively), and then digging them up, killing them and processing them into the smoked meat products when their time has come.

Their latest victim is the young, pretty Terry (Nina Alexrod), who was taken along wit her biker boyfriend who Vincent and Ida have already murdered and buried by the time she's woken up and started to recuperate.

They suggest she stay while she gets better, offering to take care of her, and the initially horrified Terry starts to warm to the couple. Not even Vincent's younger brother Bruce, the local sheriff, has any idea what they really do to make a living, and because he holds a candle for Terry he's doubly miffed when she professes to fall in love with Vincent and promise to marry him.

Until then, the film contains various set pieces of the creepy couple drawing in, tricking and capturing more victims – a pair of swingers, a travelling rock band in their van and even the local health inspector, and they're all put in the secret garden in preparation of their ultimate fate.

But the wheels have to fall off sooner or later, with Bruce still wanting Terry and determined to learn the truth about what's going on at his brother's place, Ida increasingly jealous of Terry and determined to do away with her, and Vincent wanting to bring Terry in on the secret, deluded enough to believe she'll understand and accept.

It culminates in a bizarre chainsaw battle in the slaughterhouse with Vincent having plonked a decapitated, hollowed-out pig head over his own.

What keeps the movie from having anything like an interesting story is that it contains too many elements like the garden and pig head that have no real reason to exist. Ideas like stopping and kidnapping victims off the road or burying them up to their necks are good in themselves, they just kind of sit there and don't make the impact they should in a horror movie.

None of which might be a problem if it was a truly off-the-chain exploitation flick with cheap and outrageous gore, scares or nudity, but it doesn't have them either, and the whole thing just has little to offer.